Wireless wide-area networks (WWAN) and comparable IEEE 802.11 wireless communication networks are able to provide communications for their users utilizing either wired or wireless access support, which transfers communication traffic between a user terminal and the wired/wireless domain. Typical wired support can be a digital subscriber line (DSL) or other cable access. Typical wireless support can third generating (3G) wireless cellular access, for example. In particular, an Access Point (AP) and a switch of the WWAN takes communications with the user terminal and from there the communications are routed to the wired/wireless domain.
At present, 3G bandwidth is highly variable, which can cause problems with handling communication traffic in particular situations. Typical 3G bandwidths presently hover around 1 Mbps, whereas an access point (e.g. IEEE 802.11n radio) can allow up to 300 Mbps per user terminal. Clearly there is mismatch between the wireless access side and the WWAN. Accordingly, the WWAN relies heavily on wired access (e.g. DSL). However, a failure of wired access, such as DSL failure, will leave the AP with limited wireless bandwidth for the user terminals it is serving. In addition, a recovery back to DSL could take between few hours to a day or more. As a result, during the time WWAN is in operation, the AP or wireless switch would not be able to pass all its traffic outside of the WWAN via 3G. At a certain point, the AP or switch queues shall saturate and drop packets since the 3G interface is bottleneck. As of today no mechanism is available to handle this situation
Some solutions would be through traffic shaping, rate limiting, or using Differentiated Services Code Point-based dropping of packets in the case of using WWAN, wherein traffic gets priority in order of voice, video, data, text, etc. However, there may be situations, such as in a store, where the proprietor desires that his cash register that is sending data traffic should have a higher priority than a customer phone call. Prioritized dropping of packets would be undesirable in such a situation, since that would result in a customer uncontrollably retaining a higher priority that a critical data application, and would lead to dropping of traffic of the utmost priority to the store, as the customers could dominate all available bandwidth, bringing the network to a crawl.
Accordingly, there is a need for new techniques to manage wireless wide area network bandwidth constraints in a communication network.
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